Editing Auteur Theory and the Director as Artist (section)

== <span style="color: #FFFFFF;">Understanding</span> ==
Auteur theory is understood through '''signature''' and '''consistency'''.

'''1. The Signature Test''': Can you identify the director from any random frame? Kubrick's symmetrical one-point perspective, Wes Anderson's flat centered framing, Fincher's cold blue-green desaturation — these are authorial signatures as distinct as prose style.

'''2. The Consistency Test''': Does a theme persist across radically different material? Hitchcock's "wrong man," Scorsese's guilt-ridden masculinity, Coppola's corrupted idealism — the genre changes, the obsession doesn't.

'''3. The Collaboration Problem''': Auteur theory risks erasing collaborators. ''Chinatown'' is Polanski's vision — but Robert Towne wrote the screenplay. Great films are collaborative, but great auteurs impose a unifying will that makes the collaboration legible as a single vision.

The key historical moment: Truffaut's 1954 attack on "the tradition of quality" in French cinema — arguing that literary adaptation was killing the personal film. The auteur was his alternative: the director who writes with the camera rather than adapting with it.
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